My Technology Adventure

Report snapshots older than X days in vROps

There are several ways to reporting snapshots. You can use PowerCLI, VRTools, or even vSphere Client itself. Today I will show you how to reporting by vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) 6.x. The benefit of vROps reports is you can schedule it by sending email with PDF & CSV reports. I found a post discuss how to reports by vROps. But it requests modify policy, it may impacts global calculation. What if your teams request different criteria for reports?

I noticed there is a bug in following view after finishing it. If you reporting snapshots older than X days but you delete the snapshot within X days and create a new one, VM will still show up in view! But I think it still valuable to publish this article since it’s a way to custom report in vROps.

Every report needs to associate with a view. So first step is create view. Login by admin account. Go to Views -> create a new view -> give name and description -> select List in Presentation step -> select Virtual Machine in Subjects step.

Data section is tricky. Select Snapshot Space (GB) under Disk Space metric -> Select Last in Transformation drop-list in Data tab -> Select Advanced in Time Settings -> Set Relative Start Date to Previous 4 Days and Relative End Date to Previous 3 Days -> Go to Filter tab -> Select Metrics in first drop-list, select metric Space|Snapshot|Virtual Machine Used (GB) in secondary drop-list, select is greater than in third drop-list, and set value to 0 in forth filed.

Select Last in Transformation drop-list in Data tab

Set Relative Start Date to Previous 4 Days and Relative End Date to Previous 3 Days

Transformation of metric Snapshot Space (GB) was set to last so it only shows last value in the selected time range. If value is 0 means no snapshot during the period. And time range was set to between previous 4 days to 3 days in steps above. It only shows the last value between last 4 to 3 days (It’s actual only one day). If the value is 0, we can take it as no snapshot before 3 days. If the value is greater than 0 means snapshot existing. In filter tab we filtered VMs by Snapshot | Virtual Machine Used (GB) is greater than 0. The metric value in filter tab is recent value according to my test. It filters the VMs out that don’t have snapshots.

Then just simply go next page by default settings and finish the view creation. You will be able to see a new view in the list. Next you need to create a report base upon the view. There are lot of articles in internet talk about that.

If I wanted vm’s with snapshots older than 20 days I’d set the relative start date to prev 21 days and the ending relative date to 20 days is that correct? I want a view/report that will give me snapshots older than 20 days. Please let me know what you think on this.